Kentucky 2015 NCHIP Initiative

The goal of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) is to improve the Nation's safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems. BJS provides direct financial and technical assistance to the states to improve criminal history and other related records and to build their infrastructure to connect to national record check systems both to supply information and to conduct the requisite checks.

Under this award, the Kentucky State Police (KSP) will use funds to build a court notification feature, increasing the accuracy, quality and volume of arrest data in Kentucky's Computerized Criminal History (CCH) system. Additionally, the KSP will purchase 10 Livescan stations to accept and transmit fingerprint to the FBI.

For the court fingerprinting notification project, by using statewide citation data compared with AFIS data the Kentucky State Police will have the capability to identify individuals that have been charged for criminal offenses, but not fingerprinted resulting in incomplete or no criminal history records. The KSP will leverage its existing E-Warrants System to provide notifications to court personnel, including Judges, of known individuals that are due to appear in their court. The Court Fingerprint Notification project will automate the process of creating a court order requiring the individual to be fingerprinted. This court order will include all necessary data for the jail employee to complete the fingerprint process. Ancillary benefits to this project will include a search module as well as custom reports containing statistical data which will assist law enforcement and court personnel in tracking these individuals. Both of these features will allow for either proven success of the project or identifying non-compliance with court orders for follow up action. Because the project will be housed in the existing E-Warrants System all court personnel with E-Warrants access will be easily introduced to the project with a “New Functionality Alert” on the log-in page, an email with instruction as well as training documents made available in the Help section of the system. This project will allow Kentucky's criminal justice personnel to reach a population that was previously unidentified and unreachable. Every person printed as a result of this project will improve the accuracy, quality and volume of data included in Kentucky's CCH and provided to NCIC, NICS and III.

The Livescan project will alleviate the issues caused by the aged and overworked existing Livescan stations running outdated operating systems. KSP will purchase ten (10) MorphoTrak Ruggedized Livescan stations with palm print capture capabilities to replace the outdated, antiquated models. The KSP has identified the oldest machines with the highest submission rates operating on Windows XP. The new systems will have the most current operating system which will ensure continued operations and compliance with CJIS security policies. In an efficient effort to ensure fingerprint submissions continue without problems the machines being replaced will be moved to facilities with Unix Livescan machines that are over 11 years old and no longer under any manufacturer's warranty. (CA/NCF)